The manufacturing, industrial and resources sector contribute a large volume of greenhouse gas emissions through their intensive use of energy for production processes. Energy expenditure by the sector is often one of the largest single cost items, and with dwindling natural resources of coal, oil and gas the price for energy is continually escalating. The collective various government and non-government organisations throughout the world are starting to understand the cost to the global community of Climate Change caused by Greenhouse Gas (“GHG”) emissions.
Some governments have introduced measures to ensure that consumers who use polluting energy (ie. Electricity from fossil fuel, diesel from oil) are economically disadvantaged to those who use renewable or lower emission energy (ie Renewable Electricity, biodiesel). One form of these consist of Emissions Trading Mechanisms, and are continuing to be implemented, placing a price on the greenhouse emissions created by the energy consumer.
The traditional cost of energy expenditure by the Industrial sector now can also have a mutual, but exclusive cost of GHG emission to be considered and managed. Energy efficiency or predictive methods for making prediction on energy consumption alone may not be not enough to maximize cost savings.
Typical systems and methods have been based on the singular (energy consumption) alone. An example can be found in United States Patent Application Publication No 2003/0061091 to Amaratunga et al, and see U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/613,728 to MacGregor, the contents of which are hereby incorporated by cross reference.
Any discussion of the prior art throughout the specification should in no way be considered as an admission that such prior art is widely known or forms part of common general knowledge in the field.